Record the verdict: why the US authorities will show the death penalty live
In the run-up to the congressional elections, Republicans are taking unprecedented measures. For the first time in world history, Washington will publicly broadcast the death penalty of radical Islamist Nidal Hassan on the Internet. The UN considered this a violation of the ban on torture and equated the United States with Iran and Afghanistan, while the Democrats accused the Trump team of trying to distract public attention from real problems with a political show. In the world, more than two thirds of countries have abandoned capital punishment, but in 2025, human rights activists have recorded an increase in its number by almost 80% compared to last year. About how the global discussion around the death penalty is unfolding, see the Izvestia article.
Public death penalty
— He will be shot, that's how it should be. We will make sure that people can see it, that it is public. People should understand that serious consequences await them for such things," said Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth, commenting on the unprecedented decision for the American judicial system.
Scheduled for December 3, 2026, the execution of former Major Nidal Malik Hassan will be publicly broadcast live on the Internet. Donald Trump personally signed the death sentence and approved the public execution of the perpetrator. This is the first execution carried out by the US military since 1961.
Nidal Malik Hassan
The execution of the sentence is scheduled for December 3, 13:00 (22:00 Moscow time), at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. It was at this time and in this place 17 years ago that Hassan shot dead 13 people, including 12 American soldiers and one civilian. Another 32 people were seriously injured. At the trial, the accused, being a convinced Islamist, stated that he had staged a terrorist attack to protect Muslims, including in Afghanistan, where at that moment the "illegal and immoral" US war against the Taliban regime was underway.
In 2013, the court sentenced Hassan to death, which at first they wanted to carry out as usual: in a closed format using lethal injection. However, recent events have forced the US authorities to change their minds. On September 30, a scandal broke out in Tennessee. The death penalty of prisoner Christy Pike was thwarted. She was given lethal doses of pentobarbital, but due to an improperly installed IV, the woman survived and was hospitalized in critical condition. The fiasco caused a general wave of criticism, so the military decided to return to execution by firing squad.
The US Constitution explicitly prohibits unnecessarily cruel and so-called "unusual" punishments that go beyond reason, Ivan Loshkarev, associate professor of the MGIMO Department of Political Theory, reminded Izvestia. According to him, the Pentagon chose execution by firing squad as the most reliable method of execution in order, on the contrary, to avoid legal charges of cruelty.
However, the most resonant decision was to organize a public broadcast of the execution on the Internet. In the entire history of the world, there has not been a single case of the state officially broadcasting the execution of a sentence on the Web. A separate issue will be how to restrict access to the broadcast to children under the age of 18, who are prohibited from witnessing death executions.
The UN has already criticized Washington's decision and stressed that online streaming of executions violates the ban on torture and puts the United States on a par with the regimes of Iran and Afghanistan. In these countries, public executions are carried out in city squares, but even they are not officially broadcast on the Internet. In the States themselves, Democrats in the person of Senator Chris Murphy directly accused Pete Hegseth of trying to distract attention from the failure of the war with Iran with the help of a political show.
Such a move by the White House should be considered as a PR move ahead of the November congressional elections, American scholar Malek Dudakov told Izvestia. By doing so, the Trump team wants to demonstrate an uncompromising fight against crime, considering it above talk of inhumanity. It is well known that the White House actively uses the topic of a sharp surge in crime in 2021-2022 during the presidency of Joe Biden. The expert called these actions typical populism, which the administration resorts to due to a lack of real achievements.
The global debate on the death penalty
The White House's decision to publicly execute is superimposed on a deep split within American society. According to the Gallup Institute (the organization's activities are considered undesirable in the Russian Federation), public support for the death penalty in the United States is now at its lowest level in the last 50 years. Slightly more than half of Americans support its preservation for those convicted of murder, although at its peak in 1994, more than 80% supported it. At the same time, support for execution is noticeably higher among Republicans than among Democrats.
The last time the public execution format was used in the United States was 90 years ago. In 1936, Rani Bethea was hanged in Kentucky for rape and murder. Then the crowd staged a noisy carnival out of the execution, after which a scandal broke out and the authorities moved the execution of sentences to closed prisons.
The very idea of the death penalty is fully endorsed by the U.S. Constitution, which the founding fathers wrote in the 18th century. At that time, capital punishment for serious criminal offenses was a basic element of justice that had been proven over the centuries. However, each state has the right to abolish the death penalty on its territory, which 23 of them have done. Despite this, according to the latest Amnesty International report (the organization's activities are considered undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation), the United States in 2025 ranked fourth in the world in terms of the number of death sentences executed — there were 47.
China tops the list, where thousands of people are executed every year, but the exact data is classified. The authorities advocate the use of capital punishment for terrorism, corruption and drug trafficking, believing that severe punishment is necessary to curb crime. The top five also includes Iran (more than 2,000 executions per year), Saudi Arabia (356 executions) and Yemen. Arab countries rely on the religious principle of "qisas" — equal retribution. The "life for life" rule is considered the only way to restore justice and protect the rights of the families of the victims. In total, human rights activists recorded at least 2,707 executions in 2025 in 17 countries. This is 78% more than the 1,518 known executions in 2024.
At the same time, more than two thirds of the world's countries have abandoned the use of capital punishment, including 112 that have been completely abolished. International institutions such as the UN General Assembly and the Council of Europe define it as "cruel and degrading treatment." Their main argument is the irreversibility of a miscarriage of justice. Human rights activists estimate that since 1973 in the United States, more than 190 people have been acquitted and released from death row after the discovery of new evidence. The EU's position is also unequivocal: life imprisonment gives a chance to correct judicial miscalculations and leaves the perpetrator time to realize guilt.
The Russian Federation has an indefinite moratorium on the death penalty, fixed by the decisions of the Constitutional Court. The last death sentence in the country was carried out in 1996.
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